Steve Arndt; photo by Gigi Little
Beloved literary community member Steve Arndt died on February 6, 2026. Fond memories and deep appreciations abound. This piece is from a social media post by Nikki Darling of Eugene, OR.
Steve Arndt coined the term “Spanbauerian” to describe all that he’d learned and loved at the hands of his friend and mentor Tom Spanbauer. I never knew Tom Spanbauer, but I knew who he was because of Steve’s use of this term, and the nodding agreement he had from those who had also loved Tom.
With this in mind, I propose, in the most organic, summer picnic kind of way, that we hereby coin a new term: Arndtuous. Become Arndtuous. Be Arndtuous.
Those of us who knew and loved Steve already know what this means. I think from the moment I first interacted with Steve, my soul started leaning toward Arndtuousness the way plants lean toward light.
Steve and I were of different generations, and we met first in the electronic space of Zoom readings when we still lived on different continents. There was no real reason that we should have met except that Anne Grudger was already putting her Arndtuosity to use. On that particular day, Steve and I were among the folks Anne had gathered together, in a most Arndtuous fashion, to write and speak out our love and loss. When introducing Steve, she talked about how she’d been trying for so long to get him to read on Coffee and Grief, and how she’d finally gotten him to agree. He waved off Anne’s praise, and then read out gorgeous poetry in his unaffected, earnest way.
We kept in touch for a year before we met in person. We sent each other writing, and we remarked on sentences like rivers and real rivers and the magic of shorelines and commas, everything just a pause. There is no such thing as a full stop. But don’t tell too much of the story, he told me. I’m in danger of doing that now.
To be Arndtuous, though, you almost have to tell too much of the story. You must make your love such a real thing in the world that you can hand it to your friend and then watch as they hand it to another. Arndtuous love has levitational weight, butterfly velocity. To be Arndtuous, we revel in the beauty of others. We organize gatherings of friends the way a small boy, likely in pajamas and cowboy boots with a toy pistol holstered at his side, would pull a box of collected pebbles from a cigar box he stored beneath his bed so that he could place them all in a row and admire them for their individual beauty and their shared characteristics. Hold a friend up to the light and show everyone the line of quartz that runs through them.
Give the hard copy of your words to your friend in the audience.
Say to your friend, “I really want you to come. There are so many people I want you to meet.”
Be the kindest, humblest, most loving person you can imagine.
Later, when you witness someone doing the kindest thing you can imagine in the most selfless way you can imagine, say to yourself, “That was the most Arndtuous thing I’ve seen all day.”
For more about Steve and the community he nourished, enjoy this blog post from Gigi Little and this article about him in Oregon Artswatch.
